Page 65 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

Chapter 3
Defining and Observing Modeling and Simulation in Computer Science
In this chapter, we describe our first study focusing on the Computational Thinking aspect modeling and simulation. We conducted a case study analyzing the projects of 12th grade secondary education CS students in which they made models and ran simulations of phenomena from other disciplines. We constructed an analytic framework based on literature about modeling and analyzed students’ project documentation, recordings of student groups at work and during presentations, survey results and interviews with individual students. We examined how to discern the elements of our framework in the students’ work. Moreover, we determined which data sources are suitable for observing students’ learning. Finally, we investigated what difficulties students encounter while working on modeling and simulation projects. Our findings result in an operational definition of the learning objective Computational Science19 contained in the 2019 Dutch secondary CS curriculum, and provide input for future development of both assessment instruments and instructional strategies.
This chapter is based on the paper Grgurina, N., Barendsen, E., Zwaneveld, B., van Veen, K., & Suhre, C. (2016). Defining and observing modeling and simulation in informatics. In International Conference on Informatics in Schools: Situation, Evolution, and Perspectives (pp. 130-141). Springer, Cham.
19 In this thesis, we use terms modeling, modeling & simulation, simulation modeling and computational science interchangeably, unless explicitly stated otherwise.